E3W Literature | University of Texas

Gloria Anzaldúa
Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Third Edition)
Aunt Lute Books, 2007
255 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Amara Graf

In June 2007 Aunt Lute Press released a third edition of Borderlands/La Frontera to mark the twenty years since its original publication and to celebrate Gloria Anzaldúa’s legacy in the wake of her unexpected death three years ago from complications of diabetes. It is particularly appropriate that this twentieth anniversary edition of Borderlands should be featured in this year’s E3W Review of Books, which commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the Ethnic and Third World literature concentration at UT-Austin. In 1987, when Anzaldúa’s text first appeared, Chicana feminist criticism was emerging alongside and as an integral part of post-colonial and ethnic third world studies. Following closely on the heels of the publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology Anzaldúa edited with Cherríe Moraga in 1981, Borderlands “charted a map” for women of color to integrate civil rights movements focused on race and ethnicity with the women’s movement.

The third edition features a new introduction in which ten of Anzaldúa’s peers and younger contemporaries, including Norma Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and T. Jackie Cuevas—currently a graduate student at UT-Austin—reflect on the significance of her work in the world. Since it was first published, the book has provided rich material for academic inquiry and continues to be used in college courses. Selections such as the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in which Anzaldúa documents the history of “linguistic terrorism” to which Spanish speakers in the Southwest of the US have been subjected, have been frequently anthologized. The writers, teachers, and activists who contribute to the introduction illustrate in their essays the legacy of Anzaldúa’s work. For example, Julia Alvarez describes first reading the book in 1988 in preparation for teaching the first course on Latino Literature at Middlebury College, and Rusty Barcelo recalls incorporating the text in a course she taught at the University of Minnesota entitled “La Chicana.” Barcelo describes how Borderlands “made it possible for the Chicanas and women of color in the class to change the class dynamic by re-positioning themselves at the center.” These commentaries underscore that Anzaldúa’s text is a powerful pedagogical tool that invites students to rethink their own positionalities in the classroom and the world.

Some of the other authors point to the ways in which Borderlands makes a significant contribution to the field of post-colonial studies. For example, Norma Alarcón describes daydreaming with Gloria about their shared desire for a different world where “empire-making forever disappears from the face of the earth.” In Borderlands, Anzaldúa articulates the pain—physical, psychological, and spiritual—that colonization has inflicted on brown, female, and queer bodies throughout the Americas. But she also “opens a path,” as Paola Bacchetta says, for decolonization. Bacchetta explains that Anzaldúa rethinks for “subalternly gendered, sexed subjects” decolonization procedures developed by post-colonialists like Fanon, Memmi, and Cesaire. In effect, Anzaldúa theorizes the interstices, the spaces between, post-colonial/ethnic third world studies and feminist/gender studies.

In addition to generating and expanding conversations among students and scholars, Anzaldúa’s work crosses traditional academic boundaries linguistically (code-switching between English and Spanish), generically (combining theoretical essays and poetry), and thematically (incorporating the personal, political, and spiritual). Anzaldúa herself traversed entrenched institutional boundaries, receiving an honorary chair at UC Santa Cruz without having completed her PhD. Borderlands serves as a guide for Chicanas and other marginalized groups as to how to survive within the academy by challenging its rigid confines. Norma Elia Cantú recounts how Anzaldúa’s work strengthened her “resolve to speak in the languages of spiritualities and of feminisms that the mainstream academic or intellectual circles may not sanction.” Concerned that Anzaldúa’s legacy would end with scholars using her words and thoughts to move their own “academic agendas forward,” Cantú formed the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa to ensure that subsequent generations of scholars and community activists would continue to examine the spiritual content of the book, its negotiation of queerness, and its contact with the community. For T. Jackie Cuevas, a member of such a subsequent generation, Anzaldúa was “the first model of a Chicana activist intellectual” she encountered. Cuevas attests to the fact that La Gloria’s text offers her “narratives of how to not just survive the crucible of the borderlands, but also develop a fierceness of spirit,” necessary to survive in the “headstrong world of the academy.”

In addition to charting a map and guiding women of color, community activists, writers, lesbians, and others through the borderlands, Anzaldúa’s text is also a call for political action and spiritual transformation. Borderlands is particularly relevant in 2007, argues Ana Castillo, given current US-Mexican border politics, the on-going debate about immigration and the socio-political struggles of the undocumented workers whose cheap labor supports the global economy. Just as Cantú is concerned that scholars will only use Anzaldúa’s work to further their academic careers, Castillo fears that Latina writers will compromise the political advances that radical feminists of color, like Anzaldúa, fought to achieve by seeking fame and fortune. Castillo emphasizes that Chicanas must take up the work that Anzaldúa began and “remember that the social and political struggles of our sisters in the workforce” are still critical.

One of the most famous images from Anzaldúa’s text is her description of the US-Mexican border, as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (25). She returns to this image in her last piece published in 2002, “Let Us Be the Healing of the Wound,” which was part of a project in response to 9/11. As healers of the wound, Anzaldúa urges, we should “do work that matters.” One of the primary types of work that matters, according to Anzaldúa, is spiritual activism or “spirituality employed in the service of social justice.” AnaLouise Keating states that given the academy’s over-emphasis on rational thought, scholars often ignore the spiritual dimensions of Anzaldúa’s work. Anzaldúa acknowledges the differences among us, while simultaneously insisting on our radical interconnectedness. These commonalities, as Keating explains, are catalysts for social transformation.

For readers new to Borderlands, the third edition includes Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s introduction to the second edition, originally published in 1999. Saldívar-Hull situates the text in relation to other prominent authors in Mexican-American literature, including Américo Paredes, Rodolfo Acuña, Marta Cotera and Jovita Gonzalez. This introduction is also of particular interest to local scholars of ethnic and third world studies, given that Saldívar-Hull is a graduate of the English Department at UT and spoke about her book Feminism on the Border (2000) at the first Sequels Symposium sponsored by e3w in 2002. Scholars in the fields of literature, history, anthropology, cultural, American and feminist studies will also find this book useful. Emerging at the same time as the field of ethnic and third world studies, Borderlands showcases the voice of a radical Chicana feminist who articulates the stultifying impact of colonization on women of color and others who occupy the borderlands. Anzaldúa’s legacy is to continue to call us to fight against the lasting negative effects of colonization (racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia). May we heed her call and do work that matters!